Stepmania + perception/attention is crazy

As is somewhat obvious from the previous post, I play Stepmania. To keep the history short for now, I've played for awhile, and I'd say I'm pretty good at it. I've often noticed a quite interesting phenomenon involving the interaction of two factors - perception and my level of attention - and the resulting score/grade on whatever song I'm playing at the moment. In the case that someday someone reads this and doesn't know what Stepmania is: it's DDR, played with fingers on the keyboard - which means, a stream of arrows (each one is up, down, right or left) moves towards the top of the window, coordinated with a song, and as they hit the outline of arrows, you must press a key on the keyboard. You don't need to use the arrow keys though; I started with that, but typically you'll move to using more comfortable keys: I use e, f, j, i in correspondence with the order of the arrows in the line at the top.

Now, as one gets better at this game, the intuitive thought is that the harder you concentrate, the more you focus your attention on hitting the keys at exactly the right time, the more accurate your key hits will be, and the better your score for the song. Well, I started noticing that this wasn't happening. Actually, if I relaxed just a little, and didn't try quite so hard to read the arrows, but rather let the stream fly by as if I might be just about to let my eyes glaze over, I found that I did better. I could hit a stream of keys more accurately and score better overall. (Quick disclaimer...this discovery did not cause a sudden major improvement in my skills. I don't always get the attention level just right to make it work; it's a little more random.) And someone pointed out the key to me one time: muscle memory. This makes sense and sounds rather obvious, but it's still intensely interesting to me. It might also mean that I play the same songs a very large number of times. hahaha.

The strongest and most interesting example of this occurred over winter break. My younger brother came by while I was playing what I think is a pretty crazy song and stepfile:



(Note that this video makes it look a little harder than it does when I play it. I set it to space out the arrows more, and they move faster to compensate for that.)

So there I was, telling my brother to hang around and listen to this crazy song. And he thinks it's not even a song; he's going on with this analogy, narrating the song as sounds of a computer breaking down... I'm laughing at all of this cuz I love him and it's pretty funny the way he's saying it, so definitely I'm not really able to give full attention to the game. It's even possible my eyes were starting to tear because that happens really easily for me when I laugh, which would mean I couldn't even see the screen totally clearly. Somehow, with these combined reductions in rapt attention, I ended up getting some kind of personal record score (like my second best, or something) on the song. Insane! It means I'm perceiving the arrows, this information is flying through my brain, all the visual system, the recognition stuff, and then my brain's processing which arrow is which and commanding the corresponding finger to hit the key - ALL happening before I can realize the arrow-finger-key combination. Becoming cognizant of what my body is doing is slower than my body doing it. (Actually hmm when I word it like that, it seems to make sense...) It's just that usually, we think of the process as: first we decide we want to make an action, then we do it. Here, the action is done before I know what it is!! Woahhhhh. This is really awesome. And it's my psych class on perception in real life. :D